Grant Wood: A Life
R. Tripp Evans
Sunday, 07 Nov 2010 at 7:00 pm – Morrill Hall Auditorium, Room 2019
R. Tripp Evans is the author of the forthcoming biography Grant Wood: A Life. The book uncovers the artist's personal life and the many ways it contradicted his public image. Wood's American Gothic and scenes of farmlands and folklore represented traditional values and a simple, agrarian life. In contrast, Woods himself was ambivalent about religion, had idiosyncratic relations with family and spent most of his life hiding his homosexuality. Tripp Evans teaches American art and architecture at Wheaton College in Massachusetts. He holds a PhD in art history from Yale. Two of Grant Wood's largest murals were installed at Iowa State's Parks Library in 1934.Grant Wood (1891-1942) was the first overnight sensation in the history of American art. From the moment that his now-iconic American Gothic caught the nation's attention in 1930, his work has become a blank canvas for audiences- who see what they will in his dream-like landscapes, unconventional history paintings, and forbidding portraits, with little sense of the man who created them. Join author R. Tripp Evans for a lecture and reading from his groundbreaking new biography of the artist, Grant Wood: A Life (Alfred A. Knopf: 2010), the first to be published in almost seventy years. Evans discusses the challenges and surprising discoveries of this six-year project, and sheds light on the hidden sources of Wood's powerful imagery. It is a fascinating, and truly Gothic, story.
Cosponsored By:
- University Museums
- Visual Culture Club
- Committee on Lectures (funded by Student Government)
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